Stolen camera photo's uploaded

If you took the photo of a Chihuahua at Flickr, you have caused a Web sensation.

The mobile phone used to take that picture was stolen from Web designer Ben Clemens on an Amtrak commuter train in California in mid-August, he says.

Days later, thanks to software installed in the phone for Clemens' use, the Chihuahua picture and other snaps of a woman and children were automatically posted to Clemens' photo Web site for the world to see.

"Even the thief doesn't have any privacy, right?" said Clemens by telephone from his home in Berkeley, California.

His account of the incident, posted on the weblog he keeps up for friends and family, came to the attention of thousands of people and in late August ranked as one of the most popular Offbeat News items this year on "social content" Web site www.digg.com.

While some Web "vigilantes" set out to expose wrongdoers — or other users notoriously circulate sensational fake stories to gain exposure for new products — Clemens says his discovery of the software's potential to bust this criminal was an accident and the subsequent attention unwanted.

In "Pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account," at www.practicalist.com/archives/000183.html, the Yahoo Inc. employee tells how the software he installed on his phone was set to automatically upload pictures to www.flickr.com, a site where people post photos for friends, family, or the world to share.

The thief — or whoever bought the phone from the thief — appears not to have known the software keeps running even with a different user or SIM-card. So their shots were viewed thousands of times by people on the Web.

Despite assertions from the independent makers of the software that the tale is not a promotional stunt on their part, some Web users — who may have fallen for so-called "guerrilla marketing" tactics in the past —
rounded on Clemens, accusing him of making the story up.

"This is totally a viral marketing campaign … It's a nice implementation, with just enough flaws to be found out fairly quickly, but believable enough," says a relatively polite contributor to one of many strings of comment to the story.

"I've entered into some surreal world," Clemens told Reuters.

"People assume I'm doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I'm talking to you because I want it to be known that it's not a hoax. I'm just too ordinary. I'm just too unclever for that."

He says the experience has been a lesson in the way the modern Web works: "(On the Web today), you can no longer have a separate — private and public — world. It makes you realize you have to be even more honest and careful."